Jerusalem
by zulu-ottawa
Summary: She's walked away from this place once; she won't again. She won't walk away from any of them.


to die by your side

well the pleasure, the privilege is mine

and there is a light that never goes out

**the smiths, _there is a light that never goes out_**

**What We Have is This.**

_Today_

Ruth watches Harry walk forward into the rain, mud spraying up from his shoes to pattern the back of his trousers. She stays huddled under shelter, tracking his movements over the sodden earth.

He disappears into the haze of mist and she looks up at the brooding sky; listens to the staccato of rain on the taut fabric of her umbrella, the distinctly fresh smell of wet earth weaving its way into the air. Harry doesn't reappear.

She looks to the radius of dry land surrounding her feet. She breathes deep.

_Two weeks ago_

Ros hates crying.

For a moment she wishes she was with Lucas, because then it would just be one broken person beside another, but instead she's sitting in front of this other man, who is completely and undoubtedly whole, and she's the only broken thing in the situation.

She is conscious that Lucas would just sit beside her and wait it out, wouldn't touch her, wouldn't speak, because he'd _know._ Andrew Lawrence doesn't know, so everything he does is a mistake.

He sits beside her. And she thinks, _shit, __patronising__ comfort_, but to her surprise he doesn't do anything. Just watches her, his hands held carefully in his lap like he wants to reach out and place his hand on hers, but stops himself. He watches her, and he waits.

Lucas wouldn't watch her. He would patiently allow her time, collection. Harry would do the same. _Weak,_ she thinks.

This man isn't Harry, and he doesn't equate her trust.

_Weakling. _

_One month ago_

Harry watches as Lucas stubbornly tries to push off the paramedics attending to him; as he realises what he's seeing of the woman lying on a stretcher in front of him, bloody and torn, and Harry feels sick with the panic rising in his officer's face.

Lucas is usually one for subtlety and watchfulness, the perfect spy, but Harry can see him visibly crumple now. It is the same fragility, shaking, loss of poise he sensed in him with Connie, Oleg Dasharvin, but entirely different in cause. Realisation dawns, and the younger man has his head in his hands; Ros remains unmoving.

Harry moves to guide Lucas away: up close he can see the wide-set panic flash in his eyes, muffled and ragged noise coming from behind his palm. Harry puts a hand on his red-blanketed shoulder and steers him away, feels the tension radiating through his stiff posture. Both refuse to look at the blonde now surrounded by paramedics – Harry shifts his gaze to the sight of Andrew Lawrence having his arm put in a sling.

Lucas despairingly closes his eyes entirely.

It seems that the ramifications of the explosion somewhat befall Ros with near entirety; Andrew Lawrence is able to walk away with only a broken arm and bruising. This provides Harry, somewhat perversely, with another reason not to like him.

Andrew returns to the Home Office within a few days; Ros remains in a coma for two weeks.

Harry isn't there when she wakes up; in fact it is Lucas who sees her eyes open. What he receives is a slight look of confusion quickly replaced with a smile.

He smiles back warmly; no words are transposed between them.

When Harry hears, he supposes it was for the best.

_Two weeks ago_

The world is spinning and hazy when she cracks her eyelids open; there is whiteness and a faint scraping noise, and when Ros turns her head toward the sound she is met by an angular and dark-haired figure staring with intensely blue eyes. She blinks and the haziness dissipates and resolves into the face of Lucas; he smiles at her recognition.

"Ros," his deep baritone is filled with relief.

Her throat is dry, and she attempts to respond, but ends up mouthing his name instead. He silently hands her a glass of water, eyes graced with another gentle smile.

She accepts the outstretched glass gratefully. Lucas sits back down.

The news of Ros' awakening is brought to Andrew Lawrence's attention by a page, and he goes immediately to the hospital.

He is greeted by the grouping of Ros' entire team; he gives them an animated smile which is returned by only the youngest member, then slips into the room. He notices Harry give him a grave look as the door closes.

Lucas and Harry stand outside Ros' room; it is late, Ruth, Tariq and Malcolm having gone home long ago. Harry watches Lucas' eyes follow a white-coated doctor run down the hallway before they flicker to Harry's face.

"You look exhausted, Lucas," Harry says sincerely.

Lucas straightens from where he's been leant against the wall, his jacket sliding against the surface. "I'm fine, Harry," he insists roughly, rubbing a hand over his eyes.

Harry doesn't push him. He knows his concern.

"Ros seems to enjoy your company," he says lowly. The hospital is near silent, repressive, so they are reverted to whispers.

Lucas gives a slight smile, leaning his head back against the wall. "Not as much as Andrew Lawrence," he states. Harry sees the slight flicker of his eyes in the gloom, beneath the exhaustion; a flash of the same animosity he himself feels toward the politician.

Lucas' gaze is gravitated, stolid, so Harry speaks in earnest. "She trusts you, Lucas. After Jo..."

Lucas seems to tense then, his gaze sharpening. Harry watches his Adam's apple plunge as he swallows. It is a look which lasts only an instant, but with Lucas, Harry finds he is especially attentive toward these moments. With Lucas he has to be careful, watchful, a mimic of the man himself. He takes in a breath. "All I'm saying is, it's good for her to have the support."

The younger man relaxes, looks down with a lopsided smile of contemplation. "Yeah," he says, barely audible. He looks up, hands in his pockets, blinks a few times. "I know."

_Four months ago_

Lucas, when he sees Ros knelt on the floor with her head bent in near reverence, back to him, finds his mind rushes to use displacement. It is something which has served him well, once upon a time: in those first few months of FSB interrogators and subtle chess players, when he was sat in the darkness of a cell with the sounds of the prison around him. There were thoughts of Elisabeta, then, moments of sharp and painful light like the beam of a torch slicing through the total inky blackness.

It took him 121 days of amateur 'initiation' to learn not to seek out the torch again. It took Kachimov's playfulness and the brutal searching of his mind and body to stop. He learned to block it like an assailant; thought became freedom, and freedom was repressed. Total ink black consumed, and yet.

And yet.

And yet, his first ink, strapped down like water-boarding, was of a tallship: aspiration for freedom.

His last: a pentad on his inner right wrist.

"_In celebration, you understand, Lucas. We we want you to remember, hm?"_

'I will not forget prison.' Five solid dots in the formation of a die.

The inmate trapped between four walls.

Displacement proves futile, because the moment in which Lucas steps toward Ros and sees the bodies lying beyond her crumpled frame his carefully constructed image shatters.

There is Lambert, blue shirt stained red, eyes wide to the world; there is Jo, behind him, just the same. Lucas' heart palpitates. Nausea rises.

Shit.

Lucas takes his hand from his mouth and goes to kneel beside Ros, who's face is covered by a curtain of hair, but he can tell her blank stare anyhow.

There is a gun at her knee, her hands are clasped and bound in her lap. She is completely immobile, the trajectory of her gaze taking the same track as the bullet, staring straight at Jo.

Lucas reaches out tentatively, touches her shoulder, and she snaps to attention. Her movements are suddenly so fast that he thinks them not real, until she is holding his wrist, his hand splayed to the ceiling; until she has lessened her grip and the tear tracks on her face are started anew.

"Ros." It comes out choked, but still definite. She looks like she can't breathe, doubled over, holding her hands to her mouth, and her eyes have turned to watery slits. "Ros..."

His hands come up to clasp hers, pull them away from her face; her fingers almost instinctively twine with his, her body leaning toward his of its own fruition, and then her head is against his chest awkwardly digging into his sternum, and Lucas is rendered immovable by her heavy presence.

His shoulders sag with the weight.

_Seven months ago_

"Lucas."

Lucas turns from where he's standing over the bathroom sink, to Ros leant against the door. She walks over to him briskly, hands him a shirt. Connie has just been blown to kingdom come in her own twisted version of martyrdom; Harry is missing, yet Ros has not bothered to stop for one moment.

Her voice splits the air. "You need to change. There's blood all over that one."

Lucas gives a twisted smile, holds his hands up. They are stained, the sticky, dried brown patterns standing out against his pale fingers. He runs them under the tap, the water turning pink for a moment, and once it's clear again he splashes water up over his face.

Ros thinks of leaving, but one glance at him tells her to wait. She can see the tension twined through his entire body; the careful holding of his shoulders in a rigid posture. He's turned off the tap and is leant against the counter again, staring down into the basin.

She watches a water droplet fall from the tip of his nose; drip from the wet fringe of his hair. He is unmoving, poised. He blinks and the room fractures.

In the silence he suddenly straightens and takes a step toward where she's propped against the counter with her back to the mirror, the lights high in the ceiling above turning her hair ethereally pale. She watches him move, careful and exhausted, and then he's too close, and too quiet; staring at her with stolid iris' of a blue and stilled ocean, his eyelashes lowered, gaze filtered through their contrasting, shadowed lens.

"ждать."

Her Russian cuts quietly through the room, and Lucas stops. He stares at her wide-eyed, apprehensive, the water on his skin reflecting light in tiny constellations along his cheekbone as he moves. He blinks, eyelashes splaying patterned shadows, a glancing blow which forces the tears from his eyes.

He nearly turns away; instead taking a sharp intake of breath through his teeth.

The bathroom is cold, and so when Ros reaches out to take his hand, his fingers are freezing. He won't look at her, but his grip is firm, he is frowning, his features pointed and sharp with shadows; he lifts her hand to his face, holds it redundant in mid-air for a moment. Ros watches him lean forward and rest his lips against her knuckles, close his eyes. It is not really a kiss, nor is it anything chivalrous; it is simply Lucas resigning to his demons.

He's letting her in, and she's standing wary on the threshold.

He is still, apart from his eyelashes airy tremble and she can feel his warm breath on the surface of her hand. It is slow and even, yet an errant tear leaks from the corner of his eye, dampening her wrist.

His eyes open, stare at her from under a hooded brow. She cannot describe the look they hold, hidden beneath their superficial azure. Finally, he speaks. "_I am not free, Rozalinda_," he whispers, releasing her hand.

Ros gives a soft smile. Haunted, is what they are: stolen, present in another time and place. "Московские правила," she says sadly. What she sees is an embittered man as Lucas bows his head at the phrase's sudden double meaning.

_Moscow Rules._

_Two weeks ago_

Andrew enters a room which is dark, quiet. He can see Ros, cast in shadow, lain in the bed. Her eyes are closed, peaceful, and he thinks back to those moments when he opened his eyes to smoke and ash, to her blonde hair splayed against cracked concrete, blood seeping from her hairline.

Now he can still see the bruising, covering her jaw, the stitched cut at her temple – her lip is split, and there is the faint yellowing of a near healed bruise on her left cheek. He looks down; her hands, resting against the hospital blankets are sharp and bony, the sides of her wrists jutting out at dangerous angles. He never noticed this frailty before, this thinness; he supposes that somehow he's searching for those vulnerabilities now.

He looks up to the feeling of her staring. He meets feline green eyes, casually regarding him from the dusk. He stands awkwardly at the end of her bed, hands in his pockets. "I -" He clears his throat. "I wanted to thank you, Ros."

"For saving your life?" she gives a twisted smile, blinking demurely. "My pleasure."

Andrew finds he somehow has the audacity to laugh. "Regular occurrence with you spies, is it? Saving politicians?"

"No. In all honesty, we'd like to leave most of them to the dogs." Her voice is soft, laced with amusement. "Unfortunately, protocol says otherwise."

"So I'm an exception, then." He steps closer, not quite sure of what he's doing. Her gaze follows him.

She blinks. "There's always an exception, Home Secretary."

"Is there?"

"If you look for it, yes. Rules are often not as rigid as they seem; if you know where the weak spots are, they can be bent."

"Your lot seem to be experts at that."

She smiles. "Reckless idiots, in your eyes, I'm sure."

He contemplates this, raises his eyebrows. His voice is consolatory. "Brave, I'd say."

"How noble," she scoffs.

"Maybe." He watches her carefully, her head bent, lacing and unlacing her fingers.

"I'm not afraid of dying, Andrew," she says suddenly. He doesn't respond. He can see she's in pain, waiting. Exhausted. She closes her eyes briefly, and he sees the glimmer of a tear on her cheek. Tentatively, he sits beside her.

After a long silence, she turns to him, her eyes dry. He smiles, touching his fingertips to hers. "How long have we got?" he asks gently.

Her eyes are stolid, her voice a whisper. She smiles, telling him that she remembers too; her fingers come to rest on his knuckles, cool. "Not long."

He looks down and in a definitive gesture, laces their fingers together.

Outside Thames House, in the cold night air sitting on the front steps, two figures are silhouetted.

"How are her prospects?" Ruth asks this in great concern of Lucas, who somehow refuses to look at her. Wind whips her hair into her face, and she brushes it back frustratedly, squints at his hunched figure.

He blinks, several times over. "Not great." He really thinks Harry should be her telling her this, but he's refused to leave Ros' beside for some days now. Lucas fears to think how he will be when it actually happens, death, but he pushes the thought away, leaving him to his own devices.

Ruth is staring him down, disarming. She's always caught him slightly off guard, with her luminous eyes and quiet perceptions; how she's able to read the fractures and crumbling in him from all angles and all factors, and yet never mentions a word.

She can feel his tension, he's gaunt and exhausted and still, but he's sitting with his long limbs folded on the steps, all dark and shadowed angles, and his eyes, when he does look at her, speak the volumes of his anxiety.

They are the same as her own. Pale, shocking. Beautiful. Crystalline. Cold.

He's shaking, and she thinks this is a minute crack, and he's taught himself to compartmentalise, to sift through the boxes and push what he doesn't want to encounter to the back of his mind. He's looking down, sharp profile to the ground, fragility written in his pale skin and slender fingers. She stands.

The wind pushes her hair forward again, and she gives a slight smile, hand resting gently on his arm, and leaves him in the halo of the streetlamps. She, like the rest, are on bated breath, the wait increasingly painful.

Lucas stays a moment, then turns his back to the cold and goes inside.

_One week ago_

It is death, but it's like no death Lucas has ever seen. He knows it to be harsh smells and sharp sounds, full of fight and fervour, tooth and claw; septicaemia, starvation, a clean bullet to the head.

The first death he ever saw in the service, he vomited. A twenty year old, stabbed in a back alley; four years younger than his naive self. A visceral reaction, gripping the brick wall beside him, the acidic fluid burning in his throat, pavement slick with blood.

Prison provided him with gruesome realities: the first, cellmate Desmond – a man with soulful eyes and the look of the young – taken from the cell in the middle of the night. Lucas had seen his struggle, dark shifts of shadow in the gloom, but had not dared to intervene – to do so would gain him only harsher beatings or his own death. The cell door had closed, the return to silence; he hadn't heard the gunshot, but he'd known.

Another, half a mind and high on whatever could be salvaged in this place, slowly emaciated until the ink on his skin shrunk and stretched over his breathing ribcage; until he could not move, wear clothes, for the sores they caused. He'd been high to the end; his nirvana of escape – he'd greeted his maker at the gates and gladly stepped through.

Lucas had attempted it, once. A chair left by Kachimov after an interrogation; the floor, cool and pressing against his jutting bones, hands splayed to lift himself from the ground. The chair legs had come into focus, diminished by perspective – a taunt and enticement. The noose of cloth not strong enough to break his neck, asphyxiation would claim him instead; temptation loomed, and he brought himself to face it.

He'd remembered his father, in those instances of shaking, feet digging into wicker: his father, reciting the Lord's Prayer, head held high, proud and assured.

"_And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil."_

Irony stayed bitter on his tongue; evil was an extraditionary force, something he was acquainted with all to well. One easy step, one fall, and his world would invert itself; one step...

They never left Lucas with a chair again.

Lucas watches Andrew sitting behind her as her back arches with another bought of pain, gripping her shoulders – her hair hangs before her face, the tendons in her neck tense, but she makes no sound. His eyes contact hers, and it takes him a moment to realise she's reaching out toward him.

He sits on the edge of the bed. She grabs his hand, cool and smooth, even if her face is flush with fever. She leans her forehead against his shoulder for a moment, regaining breath, and then she's staring at him fiercely, eyes glittering in the dark.

"You – you don't let Harry blame himself."

"Ros," Lucas says quietly. "Don't speak. Breathe."

Ros takes a sharp intake of breath. He brushes the hair away from her face. "You don't, Lucas," she repeats. He gives her a soft smile. She leans into him, face against his chest. Lucas can feel the tension of her fingers twining into the fabric of his jacket.

He looks to Andrew. He is staring at the back of Ros' head with glazed eyes – he lifts his gaze to Lucas, pensive and dark, defeated.

His ears become attuned to her shallow breath, in and out in hiccups, to the hair sticking to her face. He looks down and her eyes are screwed shut; he cannot move his shoulder for the hold she has on it.

There is complete, suffocating silence for a long while, and then Lucas feels the tension abate.

Ros' hand falls slack, her head pressed heavy against him, and he sees her eyes have relaxed, her body in a languid, rag-doll posture. It is the opposite to her usual straight-backed stance, the poise and stature of a dancer.

Tentatively he puts his fingers to her neck; from where Andrew sits it is like he is cradling her face, but then he looks up, slow, and Andrew knows. His gaze is fierce now, boring into him. Lucas gently disengages his fingers from hers, and leans away. She falls back into the politician's arms, and he flinches, alarmed by the weight, forcing Lucas to look away.

When he next glances over his shoulder, Ros is entirely still; he glances to the left, where Andrew is crumpled, and in the half light it takes him a moment to realise he is hunched over, face hidden, his head held in his hands.

It takes him another to realise he's crying.

Lucas arrives home to darkness and silence, his keys hitting the table the only noise. He goes to the window, stares out at Canary Wharf across the way. It is a myriad of twinkling lights, the top of One Canada Square blinking like the wingtips of a airplane in mid-flight, in and out; lungs breathing, periodic; blood pumping through aortic veins.

A warning, an end and a beginning, a rebirth.

His reflection is a flat silhouette against the glass; to those outside he is nothing but a compilation of shadows. He reaches up and touches his fingertips, one by one, to the pane; cool and definite beneath his palm, smooth and unreadable.

He closes his eyes. By mind-memory he is able to back-step his way to the arm of the sofa: he perches there, holds his head in his hands. He can feel it, the pressure, pounding at the walls of his chest, kicking his gut until he is winded, doubled over from lack of oxygen.

Slowly, as if unwilling, he slides back until he is lying on the sofa, stretched out, staring up at the stark white ceiling. He puts a hand over his unclosing eyes; his palm comes back wet.

He breathes.

It takes Andrew hours to leave the hospital. The nurses eventually force him out, and inevitably, he ends up in Whitehall, nursing a scotch. He doesn't even like the stuff, it burning as it slides down his throat, but he drinks it anyhow.

_Develop a taste for blood, and strong alcohol. _He gives a wry smile, inspecting the amber liquid within, and puts the glass down. There is the nagging sense of guilt which he cannot force back.

Everything is in small measures, now, vicarious. It's all he can do.

_Today_

In the back of his mind, he knows he shouldn't go there. He's learned that this is the same graveyard from which she was given a new life; a red leather bag and a passport to anywhere she wanted. He has to smile that she picked Russia. Of all places, it's the one he's most attached to, the one which is both paradisaical and hellish; Russia broke and burdened him, but yet it is still principle in this thoughts.

He still remembers their conversation, after Connie, cold-war spies and nuclear disarmament. _Moscow Rules._

He can feel water droplets snaking their way down his neck, and he turns the collar up against them. Through the driving haze of rain, he can see a figure at her grave already, only a dark silhouette from a distance. Lucas keeps his head down deliberately, careful to not allow his face to tilt even a fraction of an inch skyward. He digs his hands deeper into his pockets.

The graveyard is silent, apart from the staccato of rain driving into the soaked earth and bouncing off the headstones and mausoleums, his footsteps covered by its sound. The world smells fresh, awake, and it is only when Lucas reaches her grave does he raise his eyes to the figure beside him.

Andrew gives him a sidelong glance. He's set down flowers; white calla lilies that stand out against the fresh brown earth, their yellow centres almost harsh against the pallor of the day.

The stand in silence for a long while, gazing down. Then Lucas hears Andrew take a breath.

"She told me to look to the light, you know. Our way out."

For a moment Lucas is barraged by memories of stone churches and sermons, choirs echoing off the cold walls, collective breaths flickering the candles. He remembers his mother, telling him the biblical origins of his name, the meaning, like it was something out of the Oxford Dictionary.

_From Lucius, meaning 'light;luminous.'_

The same means to an end; Elisabeta called him the Russian equivalent, in their years of marriage.. The last time he'd heard it was the last time she'd walked away from him; melding into the grey and black backdrop. He still remembers the feeling of her arms around his waist; her soft laughter into his shoulder from behind as he stood at the sink, when she'd surprise him. He's lost that now, too; another box to put at the back of his mind.

If he closes his eyes he can see the flickering candles of the church, hear the singing. But he can see Russia, too, and Ros, the smile she gave him at the peace summit gracing her features.

Andrew is speaking again, he realises. "She's never going to fade, is she?"

Lucas gives a small smile. If Ros left anything, it was certainly an impression. "Never," he answers, letting his fingertips skim the headstone.

She walked away from this place once; she won't again. She won't walk away from any of them.

Her chance has come at last; Lucas knows she wasn't afraid.

He puts his hands back in his pockets, watches Andrew for a moment. He is tall and stoic, unmoving, rain dripping from his face. He blinks; a raindrop weaves its way down his temple.

Finally, Lucas is able to look to the bruised sky.

**end.**


End file.
